The first thing I noticed with the Pioneer BDP-62FD is that it was fast to load. Discs went from insertion to playing quicker than any player I have tested to this point, and was a huge change for where Pioneer was just a few years ago. The menu system was also quick and responsive, and navigating the menus of titles was very quick as well. Where older Pioneer players were slow enough that my wife would give up before a movie had even loaded, the BDP-62FD was so quick that she had no complaints at all.

Watching a film, there was nothing at all to complain about that I could see. Colors were rich and vivid but without any false color push to them, and high quality Blu-ray transfers were as sharp and detailed as you expect them to be. 3D films were handled just fine, with Avatar looking as good as you remember it being. Blu-ray concert videos shot in 1080i60 had pull-down done correctly and I could see no aliasing or other artifacts from the interlacing present in the content itself.

As a universal player, there isn't much to comment about for the BDP-62FD as all the sound quality is going to be dependent on the DACs that you use it with. I had no issues with it sending SACD, DVD-Audio, or standard Redbook CD content to my processor, but over HDMI it sounded the same as any other universal player does. Switching between regular and Pure Audio modes, the shuts down the section, didn't cause a change that I could hear over HDMI.

With streaming content the Pioneer did well with Netflix, offering 1080p video and 5.1 audio for supported titles. Buffering was quick and easy, and it has the same standard Netflix interface that almost everyone has now. Using the Marvell QDEO chipset allows Pioneer to do some noise reduction and artifact removal on streaming content, which can help out. Since Netflix has improved in quality considerably the past few years this isn't as big of a benefit as it used to be, but it is still useful on YouTube where low quality, heavily pixelated videos run rampant.

During my time with it the Pioneer BDP-62FD proved to be a well performing, quick responding player that let me forget about the experience of using the Pioneer BDP-51FD years ago.